The Law Commission have published an interesting consultation paper on how the law of contempt of court is affected by the internet. Anything that “tends to interfere with the course of justice” may be considered contempt: the Contempt of Court Act 1981 deals in particular with communications addressed to the public at large or a […]
Tag: Intermediaries
Posts about what Internet intermediaries can and can’t do; and how the law rarely gets that right…
Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights has asked for evidence on the Defamation Bill, so I’ve sent in a Janet submission pointing out the human rights issues that could be raised by the Bill. Although the aims of the provisions on websites are to increase the protection of free speech while ensuring that genuinely defamatory […]
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Wild West or 1984?
[This is the approximate text of an internal company talk, which I’ve been asked to make more widely available] One of the odd things about how people talk about the Internet is that you’ll hear it described both as “the Wild West” where there are no rules and unlawful behaviour is rife and as a […]
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Defamation Bill – House of Lords
The Defamation Bill arrived in the House of Lords this week. Most of the debate concentrated on how to reform the definition of defamation and the court processes for dealing with it. However Lord McNally (at Column 934) gave a good summary of the twin problems affecting websites that host content provided by third parties: […]
The Defamation Bill completed its passage through the House of Commons this week with only minor changes to the provisions for third party postings on websites: A new power (New Clause 1) will be created for a court to order takedown of an article if it has been the subject of a successful defamation case. […]
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EU Notice and Action Consultation
I’ve sent in a Janet response to the EU’s consultation “A Clean and Open Internet: Procedures for notifying and acting on illegal content hosted by online intermediaries”. At the moment the E-Commerce Directive (transposed into UK law as the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002) says that websites aren’t liable for unlawful material (either criminal […]
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ISOC Report on Copyright Enforcement
I’m pleased to report that the Internet Society has published a discussion paper looking at different methods being proposed around the world to respond to the use of the Internet to breach Intellectual Property Rights. For each of the approaches – graduated response and suspension of access, traffic shaping, blocking, content identification and filtering, and […]
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Notice and Action procedures
The European Commission have opened a consultation on “notice and action” procedures (in the UK we tend to refer to them as notice and takedown) by those who host content on the Internet. Since Janet customers may see a different side of the issue from us as operators of the network, it would be helpful […]
One of the perverse effects of the current law on liability of website operators is that it discourages sites from checking comments and posts provided by others. Instead the law encourages the operator to do nothing until they receive a complaint. Earlier this week the House of Commons Select Committee considered whether an amendment was […]
The 21st June sitting of the Commons Defamation Bill Committee provided some hints at answers to my questions about the Bill’s definitions and process. On the question of who will be a “website operator”, able to benefit from the new defences, the Minister suggested this should be left to the courts, who can adapt to […]